American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
9 episodes written by Tom Rob Smith
The FX Channel
A FRESH POLAROID of fashion icon Gianni Versace dying on a rickety gurney is to be sold to the highest bidder, starting at $30,000. An eager “fan” tears a page from Versace magazine and splotches it with Gianni’s fresh blood. The second season of American Crime Story (ACS), “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” takes us in nine episodes through the sequence of events that led to the murder of Versace at the hands of one Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer who had managed to insinuate his way into the designer’s orbit. Much of the narrative is about the murderer’s back story and how it led to that fateful moment in South Beach in 1997.
ACS does away with the usual stereotypical gay characters, such as that of the perverse villain or the token comic character, and offers instead a diverse array of three-dimensional human beings. The plot is structured around the contrasting lives of the two central characters, protagonist Gianni Versace, played by Edgar Ramirez, and villain Andrew Cunanan, played by Darren Criss.
